Crusader''s Cross

  But he was three places in front of me at the cash register, dressed in a dark suit and a tie and starched white shirt, even though the temperature had been in the nineties all day. His hair was as sleek and black as a seal’s pelt, his face that of a stricken man.

  In one hand he held a jar of peanut brittle while he stared out the front window. In his tailored suit and shined shoes, he looked like a visitor from an alien world.

  “You got to put it on the counter, suh,” the cashier said. She was a short, overweight Cajun woman, with a round face and thick glasses and hair pulled back tightly on her head.

  “Pardon?” he said.

  “You got to put the peanut brittle down so’s I can scan it,” she said.

  “Yes, I see,” he replied.

  “Wit’ the tax, that’s fo’ dol’ars and t’ree cents,” she said.

  “It’s what?”

  She repeated the amount. But he didn’t take his wallet from his pocket. She tried to smile. Her eyes seemed unnaturally large behind the magnification of her glasses and it was obvious she knew something was wrong and that she could not correct it. The two people waiting in line immediately behind Raphael Chalons took their purchases to another counter.

  “Suh, you want to pay me? It’s fo’ dol’ars and t’ree cents,” the cashier said.

  “Oh yes, excuse me. I’m sure I have my wallet here somewhere. How much did you say?”

  I pushed a five-dollar bill across the counter to the cashier. She took it without speaking, returned my change, and dropped Raphael Chalons’s jar of peanut brittle in a plastic sack. I picked it up and handed it to him. He walked a short distance away, then stopped in the concourse and removed the jar from the sack and read the label on it, oblivious to the shoppers who had to walk around him.

  “Can I offer you a ride to your automobile, Mr. Chalons?” I said.

  “No, I’m quite all right. But thank you for your courtesy,” he replied, looking at me as though my face were not quite in focus.

  “May I speak with you outside?” I asked.

  He walked ahead of me, the jar of peanut brittle clasped in his hand, the sack with the receipt inside it blowing away in the draft through the sliding doors. The woman who checked purchases at the entrance held up her hand to stop him. I knew her and placed my palm on Mr. Raphael’s shoulder and gestured at her in a reassuring way.

  He entered the crosswalk and was almost hit by an SUV.

  “Let me arrange to have someone drive you home,” I said.

  He stared at the label on the jar and either did not hear me or chose to ignore the content of my words. “The store didn’t have the kind she liked,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “Honoria loved peanut brittle and pralines. I was going to bring her back some from New Orleans, but I forgot. It was such a small gift. But I forgot to buy it.”

  “Mr. Chalons, I know your family bears me enmity, but I want to offer my sympathies. I also want you to understand that I never had a romantic liaison with your daughter and that I always respected her. Both my mother and my second wife, Annie, died at the hands of violent men, and for that reason I think I can understand the nature of your loss. I thought your daughter was a good person. It was an honor to have been her friend.”

  He looked at the parking lot, the heat shimmering on the rows of vehicles, an American flag popping on an iron pole.

  “That’s very kind of you,” he said. “But you’re a police officer, and you were in our guesthouse for reasons of a romantic nature or to make use of my daughter in a legal investigation. Whichever it was, sir, it belies your statement now.”

  I should have walked away. But there are certain moments in our lives that even the saints would probably not abide, and I suspect being impugned as a liar is one of them. “I think your son is at the heart of a great iniquity,” I said.

  “My son?” he said, one eye narrowing with confusion. “Which son are you talking about? What are you saying to me? My son is—”

  He pinched his temples and broke off in midsentence, as though both his words and thoughts had been stolen from him. A gust of hot wind blew a fast-food container tumbling past the cuffs of his trousers, splattering the fabric and the tops of his shoes.

  LATER, I went to Molly’s cottage on the bayou. There was probably every reason not to go there, but I had tired of wearing the scarlet letter and seeing others try to sew it upon Molly’s blouse as well. The truth was Molly had no official or theological status as a nun and in the eyes of the Church was a member of the laity. Let Val Chalons and those who served him do as they wished. I’d take my chances with the Man on High, I told myself.

  My father, Big Aldous, spoke a form of English that was hardly a language. Once, when explaining to a neighbor the disappearance of the neighbor’s troublesome hog, he said, “I ain’t meaned to hurt your pig, no, but I guess I probably did when my tractor wheel accidentally run over its head and broke its neck, and I had to eat it, me.”

  But when he spoke French he could translate his ideas in ways that were quite elevated. On the question of God’s nature, he used to say, “There are only two things you have to remember about Him: He has a sense of humor, and because He’s a gentleman He always keeps His word.”

  And that’s what I told Molly Boyle on the back porch of her cottage, on a late Saturday afternoon in New Iberia, Louisiana, in the summer of the year 2004.

  “Why are you telling me this?” she said.

  “Because I say screw Val Chalons and his television stations. I also say screw anyone who cares to condemn us.”

  “You came over here to tell me that?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  The sun went behind a rain cloud, burning a purple hole through its center. The cypress and willow trees along the bayou swelled with wind. “I say why do things halfway?”

  “Will you please take the mashed potatoes out of your mouth?” she said.

  “How about we get married tonight?”

  “Married? Tonight?”

  “Unless you’re doing something else.”

  She started to remove a strand of hair from her eye, then forgot what she was doing. She fixed her eyes on mine, her face perfectly still, her mouth slightly parted. “Get married where?” she asked.

  “In Baton Rouge. I have a priest friend who’s a little unorthodox. I told him we wanted to take our vows.”

  “Without asking me?”

  “That’s why I’m doing it now.”

  She was wearing jeans without a belt, a Ragin’ Cajun T-shirt, and moccasins on her feet. She made a clicking sound with her mouth, and I had no idea what it might mean. Then she stepped on top of my shoes and put her arms around my neck and pressed her head against my chest. “Oh, Dave,” she said. Then, as though language were inadequate or she were speaking to an obtuse person, she said it again, “Oh, Dave.”

  And that’s the way we did it—in a small church located among pine trees, twelve miles east of the LSU campus, while lights danced in the clouds and the air turned to ozone and pine needles showered down on the church roof.

  CHAPTER

  21

  WE SLEPT LATE the next morning, then had breakfast in the backyard on the old redwood table from my house that had burned. I had forgotten how fine it was to eat breakfast on a lovely morning, under oak trees on a tidal stream, with a woman you loved. And I also had forgotten how good it was to be free of booze again and on the square with my AA program, the world, and my Higher Power.

  At first Tripod had been unsure about Molly, until she gave him a bowl of smoked salmon. Then she couldn’t get rid of him. While she tried to eat, he climbed in her lap, sticking his head up between her food and mouth, turning in circles, his tail hitting her in the face. I started to put him in his hutch.

  “He’ll settle down in a minute,” Molly said.

  “Tripod has a little problem with incontinence.”

  “That’s different,” she said.
r />   But before I could gather him out of her lap, his head lifted up suddenly and his nose sniffed at the wind blowing from the front of the house. He scampered up a live oak and peered back down at us from a leafy bough. I heard the doorbell ring.

  “Be right back,” I said to Molly.

  Raphael Chalons was at my front door, dressed in slacks and a sports coat out of the 1940s, a Panama hat hooked on one finger, his shoulders and back as straight as a soldier’s. “You were very thoughtful in paying for my purchase yesterday at the Wal-Mart store. But I forgot to reimburse you,” he said. He held up a five-dollar bill that was folded stiffly between two fingers.

  I opened the screen and took the money from his hand. I had hoped his mission was a single-purpose one. But he remained on the gallery, gazing at the trees in the yard and the squirrels that darted across the grass. “Can I invite you in?” I said.

  “Thank you,” he said, and stepped inside, his eyes examining the interior of my home. “I want to hire you to find the man who murdered my daughter, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “I’m a sheriff’s detective, Mr. Chalons, not a private investigator.”

  “A man is what he does. Titles are a distraction created to deceive obtuse people. I want the monster who killed my daughter either in jail or dead.”

  “My fingerprints were at the crime scene. In some people’s eyes I should be a suspect.”

  “Those might be my son’s perceptions, but they’re not mine. Valentine is sometimes not a good judge of character. You may have a penchant for alcohol, Mr. Robicheaux, but you’re not a murderer. That’s an absurdity. I know it and so do you.”

  “I’m complimented by your offer, but it’s not an appropriate one.”

  “I think a degenerate or psychotic person wandered in from the highway and did this terrible thing to my daughter. But I can’t seem to convince anyone else of that. Some speculate it’s the Baton Rouge serial killer.”

  “The Baton Rouge guy abducts his victims and rapes them before killing them. Bondage is part of his M.O., as well as baiting the authorities. The guy who killed Honoria is somebody else.”

  He pulled at an earlobe. “I have to find out who. If nothing else, I have to exclude people who might have had opportunity or motivation,” he said, glancing sideways at me. “I can’t live in ignorance about the circumstances of her death. I just cannot do that. No father can.”

  There was no point in continuing the conversation. For a lifetime his money had bought him access and control, and now it was of no value to him.

  “As you suggest, it may have been a random killing, Mr. Chalons. Deranged and faceless men wander the country. Sometimes they commit horrible crimes over a period of decades and are not caught.” I made no reference to the fact a cross had been incised inside Honoria’s hairline.

  “So you do think that could be the case with my daughter?”

  I saw what seemed a hopeful glimmer in his eye, as though I had presented him with good news. Or maybe I was reading him wrong. “I have no idea, sir,” I replied.

  He unhooked his hat from his finger and straightened the brim, then glanced through the back window into the yard. “Ah, the outlaw nun who’s purchased you an inordinate amount of negative attention,” he said.

  “The outlaw nun is now my wife.”

  “Is that meant as a joke?”

  “That’s Molly Robicheaux out there, Mr. Chalons—not a nun, not an outlaw, but my wife.”

  “Well, she’s a disciple of liberation theology and has been at odds with our government’s policies in Central America, but no matter. Chacun à son goût, huh?”

  He let himself out without saying good-bye, then paused on the gallery and fitted on his Panama hat. I followed him outside. “Run that statement by me again?”

  “Your wife is a traitor, Mr. Robicheaux. Perhaps she’s done many good deeds for the Negroes in our area, but she is nonetheless a traitor. If you choose to marry her, that’s your business. I’m an old man and many of my attitudes are probably overly traditional.”

  I stepped close to him. “I don’t wish to offend you, Mr. Chalons—” I began, a phosphorous match flaming alight somewhere in the center of my head.

  “But what?”

  I sucked in my cheeks and widened my eyes and looked out at the tranquility of the day. “Nothing, sir. My wife and I both wish you the very best and extend our sympathies and hope that all good things come to you and your family.”

  Then I rejoined Molly in the backyard and did not mention my exchange with Raphael Chalons. Tripod climbed down from his perch in the live oak, and Snuggs appeared out of the bamboo, his tail pointed straight up, as stiff as a broomstick. The four of us commenced to share breakfast at the redwood table.

  When the world presents itself in the form of a green-gold playground, blessed with water and flowers and wind and centuries-old oak trees, and when you’re allowed to share all these things on a fine Sunday morning with people and animals you love, why take on the burden of the spiritually afflicted?

  THAT AFTERNOON I jogged through City Park and saw Clete sailing a Frisbee with a bunch of black kids by the baseball diamond. He was bare-chested, wearing only a pair of swim trunks and his porkpie hat, his skin running with sweat.

  “Married?” he said.

  “Right. Last night. Got something smart to say?” I said.

  “Know somebody a few weeks, start a shit-storm all over town, then hit the altar with about three hours’ planning. . . . Seems normal to me,” he said.

  I told him about Raphael Chalons’s offer to put me on his payroll.

  “That’s what rich guys do. I don’t see the big deal there,” he said.

  “No, I think he wants to prove to himself that someone close to him didn’t kill his daughter.”

  Clete sailed the Frisbee to a black kid, then sat on a bench in the shade and drank from a glass of iced tea. He wiped his hair and chest with a towel. There were strawberry bruises ringed around his brow and scabs in his scalp where his tormentors in Miami had wrapped a chain around his head. “So you told the old man to fuck himself?” he said.

  “Not in those words.”

  “You should have. We need to take it to them.”

  “In what way?” I said.

  “Same rules as when we were at NOPD—bust ’em or dust ’em.”

  “That’s why we’re not at NOPD any longer.”

  “It’s not over between me and this Lou Kale dude, either. By the way, where’s Jimmie?”

  “I think he may have gone to find Ida Durbin.”

  “Think?”

  “I don’t have his umbilical cord stapled to the corner of my desk. You’re the one who brought back the story about Ida saving your ass. Now, give it a rest.”

  “Married life must really be agreeing with you.”

  “Clete, you can absolutely drive people crazy. I mean it. You need your own Zip code and time zone. Every time I have a conversation with you, I feel like I have blood coming out of my ears.”

  “What’d I say?” he replied, genuinely perplexed.

  The only sound was the creak of the trees and the kids playing by the ball diamond. “Molly wants you to come over for dinner this evening. We called earlier but you weren’t home,” I said.

  “Why didn’t you try my cell?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Better check with your wife again.”

  You didn’t put the slide on Clete Purcel. But at 6:00 p.m. he was at the house anyway, resplendent in a new blue suit, his face glowing with aftershave. He clutched a dozen red roses in each meaty paw, a wedding gift wrapped in ribbon and satin paper clamped under one arm. It contained a sterling silver jewelry box that probably cost him several hundred dollars. “I’m really happy for Dave,” I heard him say to Molly when I was in another room. “He’s got polka dot giraffes running around in his head, but he’s the best guy I’ve ever known.”

  ON MONDAY MORNING I undertook a task that no drunk willingly embarks
upon. I tried to find out what I had done during a blackout, where I had gone, and the identity of the people who had seen me commit acts that were so embarrassing, depraved, or even monstrous that my conscious mind would not allow me to remember them.

  I checked out a cruiser and returned to the camp in the Atchafalaya Basin where I had awakened on a Sunday morning, hovering on the edges of psychosis, praying the sky might rain Jack Daniel’s at any moment and let my drunkard’s game go into extra innings.

  I found the Creole woman who had watched over me that morning and who had told me I had been in the company of poachers and men who carried knives. Her name was Clarise Lantier, and she was picking up trash behind the lakefront bar her husband operated, stuffing it heavily into a gunnysack. She wore trousers and men’s work shoes, and when she stooped over and stared at me sideways, her recessed, milky-blue eye and misshapen face were like those of a female Quasimodo.

  “Who were these poachers and men with knives, Miss Clarise?” I asked.

  “They live yonder, ’cross the lake. Don’t ax me their names, either, ’cause they don’t give them. Maybe they from up nort’.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They talk different from us.”

  “You’re not telling me a whole lot.”

  “They dangerous men, Mr. Dave. That’s enough to know, ain’t it?” she said.

  But she gave me directions to their camp, anyway. I drove on a dirt track around the northern rim of the lake, through stands of swamp maples and persimmon and gum trees. The interior of the woods was dark with shade, the grass a pale green, the canopy rippling in the wind. On the east shore I saw a shack built on stilts by the water’s edge, an outboard and a pirogue tied under it. A pickup with crab traps in back and a Tennessee plate was parked up on the high ground, a bullet hole in the rear window.

  There are not many places left in the United States where people can get off the computer, stop filing tax returns, and in effect become invisible. The rain forests in the Cascades and parts of West Montana come to mind, and perhaps the ’Glades still offer hope to those who wish to resign from modern times. The other place is the Atchafalaya Basin.